U.S. Policy on China, Vietnam Is Hypocritical

Am I alone in finding it unseemly that Madeleine Albright was in Hanoi hectoring the Vietnamese about human rights just days before she was to attend the celebration of the passage of Hong Kong into the hands of the Red Chinese?

“It is our view,” Albright said, “that Vietnam is holding itself back from greater international participation and respect through its failure to permit organized political opposition and a free press, its unwillingness to observe fully the right to religious expression and its refusal to release prisoners of conscience.”

This in the same week that the U.S. extended most-favored-nation status to China. The same week that the leading Chinese prisoner of conscience, Wei Jingsheng, was reported by his family to have been brutally beaten in the prison where he is being held.

The assertion of such a baldly hypocritical standard in assessing China as compared with Vietnam makes a total mockery of U.S. protestations of concern about human rights. Better to just shut up about human rights than to drag this noble cause through the lowest shoals of political opportunism.

What arrogance for a U.S. secretary of state, who herself once strongly supported the war in Vietnam, to lecture a people about the rights of humans after we killed more than 3 million of them in a war that we now concede was a mistake. Albright was a protege of Zbigniew Brzezinski and worked for him on the National Security Council staff when this country made its secret deal with China to bring the genocidal Khmer Rouge into a coalition to regain power in Cambodia after the Vietnamese had thrown them out. Albright long has been a strong believer in applying a double standard to human rights issues. Asked by a reporter why the U.S. extends trade benefits to China while continuing to isolate Cuba, the then U.N. ambassador replied, “We do not have a cookie cutter approach to policy. China is a world power. . . . Cuba is an embarrassment to the Western Hemisphere.”

Wrong. It is the Clinton administration that is a continuing embarrassment in playing the human rights card as an electoral trick. Cuba policy is driven by the need to carry Florida. The MIA issue is another vote-getter, and for that reason, the U.S. still spends more than three times as much--$10 million a year--pretending to look for downed pilots as it does on humanitarian aid to Vietnam.

Evidently Albright was moved by her visit to a facility near Ho Chi Minh City, that is still fitting amputees, that lingering legacy of the U.S. intervention, with prosthetic devices. She used the photo op to seize credit for the tiny amount of U.S. aid that supports a few rehabilitation programs in a country we devastated. The U.S., which defoliated Vietnam with Agent Orange and leveled it with more bombs than ever were dropped on any country, including the combined total used against both Germany and Japan in World War II, spends a scant $3 million a year on all Vietnam assistance.

The Vietnamese are supposed to be thrilled at the prospect of getting more investment from U.S. companies if Vietnam ensures a docile work force. As poor nations compete for foreign investments, they bargain away the rights of their workers to organize to earn a decent living. The serious human rights battle shaping up in Vietnam, China and in much of the developing world is over the rankest exploitation of human labor.

It is for that reason particularly shameful that Andy Young, another Democrat who also once served as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., should now be in the business of whitewashing the Nike Corp.’s Asian operations. Nike has 350,000 employees in Asia and the company hired Young, well known for his human rights advocacy, to tell us that all is well with its operations.

I can’t confirm Young’s assessment of conditions in the Nike factories since I was not permitted to visit one on a recent trip. But I do know the $1.50 a day Nike pays hardly qualifies as a “living wage.” In addition, a Vietnamese court last week convicted a Nike manager for ordering workers to jog in the sweltering heat as a reprisal for insubordination.

The ultimate test of human rights in Vietnam, as in China, will be in how the government and its foreign joint venture partners treat their workers, and it would be refreshing to once hear a spokesperson for the free world make that point. Just once. Just do it.